Recreational water sports that involve powered vehicles are quite popular. For example, personal water crafts (PWCs) that allow one or more riders to sit on the personal water craft and travel over water have become quite popular and you can often see them being used at lakes, oceans or other bodies of water. There are also many types of water sports that involve a tow vehicle such as a boat or PWC towing a person over the surface of the water with the person riding on water skis, a wakeboard, etc.
The popularity of these water based activities is likely a result of many different factors. However, all these activities tend to involve relatively warm weather and getting wet. Additionally, the fact that if a person were to fall in the water the water is much more forgiving then if they were to fall on land, likely has something to do with the popularity of these activities.
More recently, there have been some devices, such as the personal propulsion device described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,900,867 to Li, that combine water sports with the ability of the user's operating the device to be lifted into the air like they were flying. The Li device for instance discloses a personal propulsion device that includes a body unit that a person is strapped into and then uses jets of water to allow the operator to be propelled into the air above a surface of a water suspended in the air by these jets of water. The use of this device over water not only provides a source of propulsion (the water in the lake, ocean, etc. being pumped to the device to create the jets of water being discharged from the device), but if the operator crashes the device, their crash into the water is much softer than if they were to crash into the ground.
However, the device described by Li does have disadvantages. It is quite cumbersome and requires the operator to be strapped to the body unit, preventing them from easily releasing themselves from the device. Additionally, if the person were to crash into the surface of the water, although it would be softer than crashing into ground, the operator would almost certainly find themselves underwater and strapped to the body unit. Additionally, the controls of the body unit may seem foreign to a new operator and it might take some time for a new operator to get the hang of operating the device.